emergence of stricter dress conventions and prac-
tices of female seclusion. In the past, female domes-
ticity occasionally served as a marker of high status
(for example, among aristocratic families of the
Sokoto Caliphate of Northern Nigeria and, after
the 1940s, in Niger, Senegal, Guinea, and Mali
among traders with business ties to the Arabic-
speaking world). Starting in the 1980s, definitions
of female modesty qua domesticity gained currency
among broader segments of the urban population,
in an economic situation in which lower-class
women had to assume greater financial responsi-
bility for the family. To husbands and fathers, keep-
ing a woman at home indicates their ongoing
capacity to provide for their family and to maintain
control over women and juniors. Thus, the rejuve-
nation of discourses on female propriety can be
understood in the light of recent transformations in
domestic economies that are a consequence of neo-
liberal structural adjustment programs since the
mid-1980s. The new ideal of female domesticity
contrastscuriously with the significance that prota-
gonists of an Islamic moral reform attribute to
women’s public appearance. In their view, women’s
public enactment of modesty is constitutive of the
new moral order on which the political community
should be based.
Several processes are at the origin of the seem-
ingly contradictory tension between female domes-
ticity as a status marker and the new emphasis on
women’s public enactment of Islamic virtue. Over
the past 20 years, rank and economic differences
among women have often been exacerbated, par-
ticularly in urban areas. Women of diverse socio-
economic standing reflect on and negotiate their
differential capacities for moral self-realization by
conveying their often conflicting views on propri-
ety. The fact that women contribute substantively
to the discursive construction of female modesty as
the cornerstone of different moral and political
communities also needs to be related to emergent
forms of female mutual support groups, and to
sub-saharan africa: west africa 507the spread of informal educational institutions and
activities which often combine old and new para-
digms of religious and secular knowledge acquisi-
tion. Finally, political liberalization in the late
1980s in some West African countries made possi-
ble the emergence of a plural civil society and the
proliferation of media technologies which allow for
a decentralized appropriation of media products.
All these developments made women’s public inter-
ventions more conceivable and feasible, but also
threatened conventional views of women as guar-
dians of family continuity.
The new stress on women’s public enactment of
propriety needs to be read in the light of this para-
doxical development. Proponents of an Islamic
revival identify female dress practices as a primary
strategy for enacting virtue and for inviting others
to follow their call for moral reform. The choice of
decent attire entails a set of polysemic, publicly
delivered statements about the relationship be-
tween political and personal subjectivity, and about
the importance of individual virtue to the norma-
tive foundations of the political community. In this,
current Islamic revivalist trends articulate through
their modesty practices a particular vision of why
and how the personal is political.Bibliography
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